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Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#41

Post by smetj »

smallerfish wrote: post #28
polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

Slack's pretty bad as an information repository. How do you know there hasn't been a subsequent discussion that updated the conclusion of a particular chat? Search isn't particularly consistent in how it serves up results. By all means chat asynchronously to decide on something, but then get it into a wiki. I actually like Slack's auto-expiry for free accounts, as it incentivizes the mindset - if you want to keep the…

Agreed!

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#42

Post by kokanee »

smallerfish wrote: post #28
polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

Slack's pretty bad as an information repository. How do you know there hasn't been a subsequent discussion that updated the conclusion of a particular chat? Search isn't particularly consistent in how it serves up results. By all means chat asynchronously to decide on something, but then get it into a wiki. I actually like Slack's auto-expiry for free accounts, as it incentivizes the mindset - if you want to keep the…

Sure, this a correct mindset, and an obvious one for people who build and maintain information repositories professionally, but at an average company with hundreds or thousands of people, it's a losing battle to enforce. Paying for Slack and having the ability to find information in conversations that should have been documented but were not is valuable in practice.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#43

Post by theideaofcoffee »

skilled wrote: post #4
LorenDB wrote: post #2

There's no point in overhauling IRC when Matrix is a much more modern alternative that includes E2EE and such things out of the box, no custom extensions required. Also IRC doesn't store message history, which is kinda a really important thing.

Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue if that is what you really need. I always thought that not having history was part of the magic of IRC. That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.

This has all the energy of the infamous response to Dropbox back in the day [0]. "Just set up a client, and a bouncer, and adjust your retention policy in this text file buried three levels deep and make sure you have enough disk space, and...", when at the end Julie in HR just wants to keep an eye on what happened in the #watercooler channel when she's away on vacay.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#44

Post by 082349872349872 »

rickcarlino wrote: post #23

I use IRC regularly and will continue to do so, but I’ve changed my opinions in recent years to admit that it is only useful for power users. The spec maintainers went too long without supporting features of competing systems like authentication, history, Threaded discussion, and a whole bunch of other things. Many of these features have been added to v3 of the specification, but it is too little too late. It is abso…

"only useful for power users" is table stakes for avoiding excess noise in any messaging application

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#45

Post by aeadio »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #40
polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

Being able to search in the past for a half-remembered conversation sounds great until you have idiotic, asinine corporate data retention policies that require anything beyond 90 days to be deleted anyway, for some bullshit reason like being open to litigation or whatever and that being subject to discovery. Then that's implemented with no warning to be able to migrate important info out into a wiki or other document…

> Being able to search in the past for a half-remembered conversation sounds great until you have idiotic, asinine corporate data retention policies that require anything beyond 90 days to be deleted anyway, for some bullshit reason like being open to litigation or whatever and that being subject to discovery.

Well that just doesn't sound legal. In fact, I'm pretty sure Google just got the book thrown at them for this. [1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/tech/judge-google-deleted-cha...

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#46

Post by throwaway562if1 »

smallerfish wrote: post #28
polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

Slack's pretty bad as an information repository. How do you know there hasn't been a subsequent discussion that updated the conclusion of a particular chat? Search isn't particularly consistent in how it serves up results. By all means chat asynchronously to decide on something, but then get it into a wiki. I actually like Slack's auto-expiry for free accounts, as it incentivizes the mindset - if you want to keep the…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#47

Post by wasyl »

weitendorf wrote: post #34

> why don't more companies just set up their own IRC server? Why don't you grow your own food? Why don't you just write your own payment processor? I used to think this way until I started a company with employees. My opinion on the matter changed almost instantaneously. 1. One does not simply set up their own "X". Setting up X takes time and you will also have to manage it, which also takes time (and is harder to an…

> Why don't you grow your own food? Why don't you just write your own payment processor?

I find that usually if someone says "why don't X _just_ do Y", they haven't really considered what it takes to _just do Y_. Similarly,

> I know the UI/UX isn't the best, but that could probably be fixed pretty easily

could be expanded into 50 points of why exactly it wouldn't be _pretty easy_ to to "fix IRC UI/UX".

Honestly I don't know what answer OP expected here. If it's easy to set up/maintain Slack alternative based on IRC, with fixed UI/UX and appropriate for _most companies_, they should simply start a Slack competition for half the price and rake the profits, I guess

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#48

Post by ta1243 »

pwg wrote: post #5

> why don't more companies just set up their own IRC server > The pricing for Slack You've answered your own question there. Because "pricing" an open (as in RFC defined) IRC server is significantly more difficult than "pricing" a proprietary protocol. So the "companies" follow the money, and setup their own proprietary silos.

Of course OP could offer IRC as a service, undercut Slack etc, and make a fortune. Just like this guy could have undercut dropbox

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#49

Post by adamc »

smallerfish wrote: post #28
polpo wrote: post #16

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring: Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screen…

Slack's pretty bad as an information repository. How do you know there hasn't been a subsequent discussion that updated the conclusion of a particular chat? Search isn't particularly consistent in how it serves up results. By all means chat asynchronously to decide on something, but then get it into a wiki. I actually like Slack's auto-expiry for free accounts, as it incentivizes the mindset - if you want to keep the…

This is the wrong point of view for many (probably most) workplaces, where the officially "maintained" information repositories are often very out of date and where the alternatives are usually: 1) Find a conversation you can at least start from, or 2) Get someone to give you a brain dump now.

Sure, a curated, well-maintained repository could be better. It also requires work time that usually doesn't get budgeted for. Slack is a band-aid, but a useful one.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#50

Post by ramesh31 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #36
ramesh31 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app. Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point). This is where Slack really squeezes companies. Our (barely) medium sized org has a seven figure Slack bill, and they only support 1 year of history. Going beyond that becomes absurdly expens…

Where do see the one year history limit? Any paid plan has unlimited history, from what I see.

The numbers you see on a website are very different from what corporate pays. Everything is negotiated through sales.
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